Alabama

EDITORIAL: Alabama's future slipping away

Because of short-sighted policies, Alabama's prospects for catching up with today's

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economy, much less tomorrow's, continue to slip away.

Labor experts at Georgetown University predict Alabamians will continue to be trapped in low-wage jobs requiring low levels of education. The reason is simple: Those are the kinds of jobs the state is creating and training workers for.

Even worse, Anthony Carnevale, the author of the Georgetown study, says the state is losing its best college graduates to other states that offer better opportunities. The findings of Carnevale's study were reported Sunday by The Birmingham News' Roy L. Williams. The study is called, "A Decade Behind: Breaking out of the Low Skill Trap in the Southern Economy."

And its findings about this state are dreadful. Among 17 Southern states and the District of Columbia, Alabama ranks:

Third in the number of jobs for high school dropouts (47 percent).

11th in the proportion of jobs requiring a graduate degree (8 percent).

15th in the proportion of jobs in 2020 that will require a bachelor's degree (15 percent).

"Southern states like Alabama are victimized by having too many low-wage jobs and not enough highly educated residents to get companies paying better wages to come there," Carnevale told The News. "Alabama is an example of a state kind of stuck over the long-term, lagging further and further behind most of the nation."

He also noted that students have less of an incentive to seek higher education when the state can't offer them high-skill jobs. And companies have less of an incentive to move to Alabama when they might not be able to find the educated workers they need.

But instead of investing more in public schools, Alabama's leaders see already shrunken state school budget as the source of money to bail out the state budget that supports Medicaid, the courts, prisons and other agencies. This spring Gov. Robert Bentley failed to persuade the Legislature to steer money from the school budget to help General Fund agencies. He tried this even though school tax revenues have fallen about $1 billion a year below their pre-recession levels.

Now, Bentley wants voters on Sept. 18 to approve a plan to take up nearly $490 million over three years out of a state savings account for natural gas royalties to prevent a statewide calamity.

The Alabama Education Association is backing Bentley's plan because its leaders believe he will succeed in persuading the Legislature to balance the General Fund budget with school money if voters reject the referendum.

But a raid on the school budget would simply compound the difficulty of the state's struggle to help its students succeed.

John Norris, a Birmingham banker, said that because Alabama has neglected education, it "is and will be a victim of its past."

"Alabama, like much of the United States, has been busy producing workers for yesterday's economy," Norris told The News. "Tomorrow's economy is going to be heavily focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

Alabama spends little enough on its schools as it is, and spending even less on education will not raise any student's test scores.

It is not asking politicians too much to understand that and act accordingly.

Nor is it asking them too much to understand Carnevale when he says, "Alabama is an example of a state kind of stuck over the long-term, lagging further and further behind most of the nation."

By Mike Hollis, for the editorial board. Email: mike.hollis@htimes.com.